I am the registrar for an upcoming event and am having trouble with entering a mailed in entry. This entrant is using the number "07" and another car is already registered within the same group with the number "7". In our organization, these are not duplicate, but allowable. Is there some way to get MAE to recognize the difference between a standard number and one with a leading zero?

I can provide you a link, but I doubt it will help you. www.mcscc.org is our main site, but our permanent number data base is maintained offsite by our licensing director, so I would have to attach a file for you to look at.
Basically, our race organization has entrants broken into 6 groups, with numbering to be unique within each. With the exception of Vintage/Historic, we allow numbers from 1-199 only, with the majority being used bet. 1-100. Because some groups have a very high number of entrants, we have basicaly run out of numbers 1-100, so we have also allowed some with leading zero's: 00, 01, 02 thru 09. That's where I ran into a problem, and maybe some of our entrants do, too, if they use MAE to register. It reads "7" and "07" as the same, then gives the error message "the number you have chosen has already been selected" (or similar)

For the few instances we may have this occur, I don't want to have things get messed up for any of your other organizations. This is personally the first time I have run into this as an issue, and I have not heard of anyone complaining that they are having numbering problems when using MAE. I got around it by making a manual change to my Excel sheet I downloaded from your site. I can work with this, but mainly posted my error to see if there is a way (that I missed) to let MAE know about our numbering system when setting up our event. Your site appears to allow numbers to either be unique within groups, or within the entire event, but not a way to add a selection for these odd numbering systems.

Anyway, I don't want to make work for you when it may not be necessary. I appreciate what you do as it is!

Using the forums is fine. That way others who might have similar questions can see the dialog and possibly get the answer they seek.

I took a look at the code to re-familiarize myself with the number assignment and validation routines. Numbers are stored in the database as strings so it is ultimately possible to treat 7 and 07 differently. Unfortunately, the code change isn't going to be so simple and it will take a bit of work to make it function as you desire.

However, I just came up with a workaround! Here's a quick way to get around the number restriction: - use negative numbers to represent the 01, 02, 03, etc. Like -01, -02, -03. Since negative numbers are numerically different from positive numbers, you can sneak through the uniqueness restriction this way.

I've added this feature request to my task list and will (hopefully) address it within the next few weeks.

You could as an event organizer delete the 3 options for picking numbers and instead put in your own "Pick a Number" but using text instead of numbers.

Not sure if that would work, but when I organize our event and sort by numbers, Excel asks me to sort by whatever looks like a number when I download to my comp. I'm guessing it's seeing that column as text rather than numbers.